As we reflect on ourselves and the coming times in this, the Year of our Lord Fourth 2014, let us celebrate the fact that on this day three years ago, the first user of the ATLAS Universe Repository registered their account. Congratulations!

Since nothing has happened on the news blog for months, I decided to go and add a feature nobody at all asked for: metaverses. Well, it was motivated by personal need, but.

Anyway, the gist of the whole thing is that metaverses are universes whose constituent entities are universes. You can add universes to a metaverse page and it will display all their child pages as if they were one universe. The most immediate, if rare, use case is when two or more people decide to join their conworlds, but since this is a general excuse to have more universes I'm sure people will find reasons to use them. (…)

Because of the recent move away from our primary webhost (motivated by stability issues), Annie now has a dynamic IP. This is rather undesirable, because Annie's DNS provider doesn't have a nice, clean way of supporting dynamic IPs for whole domains—but it does do redirects for subdomains! For the time being, if Annie appears to not be responding to connection attempts whatsoever, try dynamic.anthologi.ca instead. That should do the trick.

For better or worse, Annie has been moved from its previous colo server to my home connection. Hopefully, this will take us from the current 80-90% uptime situation to a more reasonable 99.5% uptime—albeit at the cost of bandwidth.

Much unnoticed, Anthologica celebrated its first birthday this month! For the first year of the new platform, this one hasn't been too shabby at all. Many conlangs were created, many words itemized, and many stories written of strange lands.

But most importantly, the site itself has changed a lot since its earliest days as the ATLAS Universe Repository, and there are a bunch of changes yet in store for the new year, so things are shaping up to be exciting.

Since the boss has not deemed an update worthy of news in a while, I am going to make a news post for the recent more-or-less minor changes to the site in an attempt to make the front page less static. (…)

A lot of things have happened this past month—Anthologica passed 2000 forum posts, 50 registered users, and 8000 words! For those of you who don't regularly peruse the forums in detail, here's a summary of some of the things that have been going on, both in the community and in site development. (…)

I have an admission: I had no idea what to do with the site's front page for the longest time.

But hey, now I do!

The old one is archived here. Feel free to contribute conworld-related "Did you know?" facts on the Trivia page. A forum thread will be added soon for nominating featured articles/universe/languages/etc.

1. Dictionary categories are now called tags. This should prevent them from being confused with lexical categories, particularly since it's advisable to create a tag for each category.

2. A number of dictionary features were cluttering up the mode bar. Dictionaries are, by far, the most complex and featureful things currently on the site. Several features have been moved into a special "tools" page, which has been augmented additionally with quick access to the importer and flash cards. (Also the hidden "printable" mode is included.)

4. Pronunciation field. I've had 3 or 4 requests for this. While I wanted to wait for the SCA to be implemented before adding it (since, in theory, the pronunciation for most words would be regularly derivable from the headword form), there's no reason you should have to wait if you already have them written down.

Hi folks! Sorry we were offline for the last day or so; there was a security concern with our hosting arrangements that required some unscheduled maintenance to resolve. But all is better now, and things should be (and stay) nice and cosy.

I'll be adding more convenient data backup and download features soon to cushion things in the event of any future server issues.

The site has always had three ways of accessing pages: /?title, /?id=id, and /?page=title. The id addressing mode isn't very friendly, and the title addressing modes are unreliable—the page with the lowest ID number gets linked, so a title link can really only be used once.

But no longer! We now have hierarchical addresses, where you use slashes to separate multiple page names! So now you can be sure that you always link to the right thing. The first segment of the path is always resolved the old way, but after that it looks for child pages, so you can reference dictionary entries etc. readily and unambiguously.

Also: the question mark can now be left out! So you can link to anthologi.ca/users/testament directly, using the syntax [/users/testament|anthologi.ca/users/testament].

The Public Universes page is now up! While Atlas has always been designed with support for shared universes in mind (i.e. a group of users collaborating on one project), there is now a public index of both these projects and a new type of project, the open universe. In an open universe, you can create chapters and languages, but no one else can edit or add to them. This is ideal if you have a conlang or auxlang that doesn't require a whole universe portfolio of its own.

The Public Universes page is freely editable by logged in users, so feel free to add your own shared universes to the list. If you would like to create a new open universe, contact an administrator (i.e., me.)

The Messages system was originally designed just for internal site notifications, but now you can use it to harass other users of the site! Just look for the send message link on any user page, or the message link under any post, and spam away. (Note: please do not actually spam, or you will be excommunicated.)

Although they're still a bit rough around the edges, languages, language families, and recursive wiki pages are now live. This means you can add attachments to any article in your universe's documentation and that dictionaries and languages can now be organized in a more structured manner. Existing content will be converted over after a bit more polish and testing.

Today we bring you (a) universe groups—the ability to let more people work with you on a universe—and (b) universe attachments—preferably images, you can now upload up to 50 files per universe. Recursive wiki articles are currently being tested and can be expected soon, with more room for more attachments.

From now on, when creating a dictionary you'll have to set up its list of parts of speech. To do this, simply go to the edit page (under the dictionary title at the top) and click "Save". If you want to change the supported parts, simply modify the list. The names on the right will be abbreviated to the values on the left, and they will appear in the language dropdown as ordered. This update extends to the Dictionary Importer, which has also been updated to fix name collision issues between dictionaries.